Yan Pei-Ming / Courbet - Body to body

From 12 October 2019 to 19 January 2020 at Petit Palais. Paris.

On the occasion of Gustave Courbet's Bicentennial (1819-1877), the Petit Palais is pleased to present Yan Pei-Ming / Courbet, Corps-à-corps, extending the exhibition organized this summer at the Courbet Museum in Ornans. A dozen works by Courbet, all from the collections of the Petit Palais, will be shown next to fifteen monumental canvases by Yan Pei-Ming made for some in Courbet's studio in Ornans. They will be presented this time in a hanging intentionally inspired salons of the nineteenth century, an unprecedented experience for the artist.

The Petit Palais has indeed one of the largest collections of paintings by Courbet thanks to purchases from the City of Paris made at the end of the nineteenth century, enriched at the beginning of the twentieth century by the gifts of his sister, Juliette Courbet and of critic Théodore Duret. This set includes major works from the leader of realists such as The sleep, The Demoiselles de Bord de Seine, Proudhon and his children, Self-portrait with the dog, Lovers in the countryside, or Nap during the hay season... Yan Pei-Ming discovers the work of the French painter in a black and white propaganda book during his first years of study in China. Installed in France since 1980, he then rediscovers the diversity of the work of the artist for which he feeds an increased fascination. In fact, in this body-to-body presented in the gallery of large formats of the Petit Palais, the materiality of the paintings of Yan Pei-Ming and Courbet are spoken and answered.